The Problem With Oval Race Tracks

 

I was once in an independent cost evaluation (ICE) meeting when one of the customer representatives, a young woman who presented with quite the attitude, challenged the project controls coordinator about an element in one of the Earned Value reports.

“Why doesn’t the cumulative Earned Value amount equal the actual costs?” she demanded.

“Because that’s not what Earned Value is” came the response.

The rep exploded. “Do you know PMI®?!” she stormed. “I’m a PMP®!”

As if that was supposed to trump the rules of basic cost performance management.

Which simply goes to show one of the dangers inherent in certification, the ProjectManagement.com theme for July. Although obtaining a certification such as the PMP® can be quite the challenge, what with the assembling and presenting of education and professional credentials, as well as passing the test, it’s not an end-point. It’s really more like the starting line which, like an oval race track, has the starting and finishing lines at the same place.

Don’t believe me? Consider that medical doctors were first being certified in the United States in the early nineteenth century. At that time it was considered perfectly acceptable for certified doctors to do the following:

• Prescribe narcotics for very young children as a “remedy” for their acting like, well, very young children.
• Cut off part of the tongue for stutterers.[i]
• Inject paraffin wax in order to smooth out wrinkles[ii] (will future M.D.s view our use of Botox with similar abhorrence?).
• Bloodletting was considered a viable treatment for a wide variety of ailments.

I could go on, but not without getting kind of gross, but you see the point. Certification, in and of itself, is no guarantor of advanced capability or expertise. It only means that the certified person is up-to-speed on what the current state of the technology happens to be at that time.

So, in the next century, which project management practices will lead those with PMP® numbers in the tens of millions to look back and wonder “what were they thinking?” Well, what do the now-considered absurd medical practices have in common? They weren’t based on the scientific method (with the exception of giving narcotics to young children. I have no doubt they worked as intended, based on measurable and observable data. They just didn’t properly consider the long-term or side effects). Not only were the absurd practices not based on the scientific method, they were apparently based on a few experts’ opinion, or speculation.

Now consider: which PM practices currently in vogue are not based on observable, quantifiable data and analysis, but are instead predicated on group speculation, or opinion? A quick distinction is in order: feedback data is factual in nature, made up of observations of those things that have already occurred. Conversely, feed-forward data isn’t really data at all – it’s someone’s idea about what should be expected in the future, usually based on that person’s experience. As my regular readers know, usable management information must have three characteristics:

• It must be accurate,
• It must be timely, and
• It must be relevant.

Leaving aside the relevance discussion for the moment, feedback-type data is accurate (if it’s been collected properly), but often suffers from not being timely enough, due to how long it takes to collect and present. On the other hand, feed-forward data is timely, in that it looks to the future. It is, however, notoriously inaccurate, since an accurate look into the future is considered so rare as to be usually attributed to divine inspiration, if not intervention. A whole bunch of highly subjective assumptions must come about for any feedforward data to be of use.

So, this being the case, can we use the rubric of scientific-method derived theories, based on objective data, providing the basis for the ideas we embrace, while rejecting the subjective, speculative ones?

While that works for me, I doubt it will work for the PM world in general. For if we use the next-to previous sentence as our litmus test, we’ve just obliterated the majority of risk management, communications management, some portions of human resources, and even a little bit of quality management. Each of these disciplines have their advocates, who can be expected to push back on any attempt to diminish or eliminate their favorite notions.

Which brings us back to our racing oval. Congratulations on getting certified! It’s a wonderful thing. You are now set to more critically examine and engage the current thinking in the project management sciences. Oh, by the way, that finish line you just crossed? It’s also a starting line.

So let’s get started.

[i] Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/15-most-bizarre-medical-treatments-ever/4/ on July 3, 2017, at 8:30 a.m. MDT.

[ii] Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/15-most-bizarre-medical-treatments-ever/14/ on July 3, 2017, 8:32 a.m. MDT.